In a bid to prepare for their next generation of graphics hardware launch, AMD might possibly be discontinuing their Radeon HD 7990 “Malta” card which launch in April 2013. Overclockers.Ru reports that AMD Radeon HD 7990 is available in limited supply and has been minimized to a certain extent that it won’t even be available to consumers by the end of this quarter.

Update: The card has not been discontinued and remains the king of performance. They are slight issues with supply at the moment which overclockers.ru mentioned but it isn’t ELO’d and the new frame pacing drivers hits on 31st July improving stability and performance on the Radeon HD 7990.

AMD Radeon HD 7990 Possibly Being Discontinued

AMD launched their Radeon HD 7990 codenamed “Malta” as a reference design in April 2013 replacing the custom HD 7990 models that were made by its AIB partners months ago. The card features better thermal specifications and lower power consumption as compared to the custom made models such as the Devil 13. Although the card is on top of the performance ranks, it didn’t attract a wider audience due to frame pacing issues that are still being faced by Crossfire and Dual GPU AMD users to this date. AMD has promised a driver which will fix those issues to some extent and arrive on 31st July but even with the driver it can’t be promised whether the HD 7990 will become a success.

It has already been proved that people eye towards single chip GPU solutions for performance since they don’t get stuttering issues. NVIDIA said in a recent report that the GeForce GTX Titan was outselling their GeForce GTX 690 that launched a whole year back. Maybe the value of the Radeon HD 7970 and its “Never Settle” bundle promo prompts users to get dual HD 7970’s instead of a thousand buck HD 7990 which has more issues at its end.

At the end, if the Radeon HD 7990 does get discontinued by the end of this quarter which seems highly possible, then it could be the shortest lived flagship graphics card with a time span of just a few months. In the meantime, people would be happy to know that this could be a sign or preparation of AMD’s upcoming next generation GPU series codenamed Volcanic Islands which are looking to be very impressive. The Volcanic Islands GPUs are being planned for launch in Q4 2013 with a much exact launch date around October 2013. It remains to be seen as to what kind of performance would they feature against the GeForce GTX 700 series and the GK110 architecture. Expect more details in the upcoming months.